Amazon has released a new API which helps Alexa developers build applications for childcare-focused devices.

The aptly-named Baby Activity Skill API will allow things such as logging the latest diaper change. For parents who work shifts at different hours, this could be useful to ask Alexa for the latest change without having to disturb the other person at work.

It is an endearing image for anyone who falls in love with the idea of open source technologies. You have an idea, work hard at it and then eventually give it life, making sure anyone can build with it – and more importantly, build upon it and improve it. Yet, ultimately, bills still need to be paid and mouths fed.

This may have entered the minds of some developers as the news of Red Hat’s blockbuster $34bn acquisition by IBM rippled through...

Everyone wants to do and be agile – but with greater maturation, are there issues in how it comes about? A few noises of late suggest structural changes need to be made.

In April, software provider CollabNet released its latest State of Agile Report, noting as one of its three themes that agile adoption is growing within organisations both more widely and deeply. This publication

Fortnite is a phenomenon that Android users have waited a long time for, but the decision to bypass the Play Store will have consequences for the platform.

The battle royale game is an undeniable hit. According to SuperData Research in May, Fortnite had generated $296 million in the month of April across mobile, console, and PC platforms. This year, it’s expected to make developer Epic Games as much as $2 billion.

The number of Play Store downloads of apps continues to beat the App Store, but the latter remains leagues ahead in generating revenue.

According to figures by App Annie, downloads on the Play Store have increased 20 percent year-on-year. That’s impressive enough, but put in the context that represents 160 percent more growth than Apple’s iOS App Store – well, it’s quite staggering.

Samsung has been committed to its homegrown platform for a few years now, with Gear smartwatches and fitness trackers exclusively using the Tizen OS, so seeing a switch to Wear OS is something of a sea change.

Lego took to the New York City Toy Fair this week to announce its new line of connected toys. They're called Powered Up, and they stride the line between traditional sets and programming-oriented brands like Boost and Mindstorms. The idea is to make sets that are fun out of the box, with nothing but building required, but to add in smarter elements for kids to take the toys further, like remote controls and programming.

The lead set is the Batman App-Controlled Batmobile, a remote controlled car driven...

After more than three years of development, AsteroidOS has finally reached the version 1.0 milestone. This open source smartwatch OS is designed to offer Android Wear owners an alternative, especially for older watch models that have stopped receiving Wear OS updates.

The first stable release of AsteroidOS includes what its creators call 'all the features needed for a modern wearable experience'. That includes core watch apps like alarms, timers and weather, plus...

New data from DigitalOcean on developer opinion has gleaned interesting insights; company size is likely to dictate usage of continuous delivery solutions, while vendor lock-in and professional support were primary roadblocks for the rise of open source software adoption.

The figures come from the company’s latest quarterly report, Currents, around developer trends in the cloud, which polled almost 6,000 respondents.

The larger the organisation, the more likely you are to use a CI/CD system. 52% of...

DevOps is no longer a ‘nice to have’ to improve workflow for developers and software professionals, according to the latest study from software provider GitLab.

The company – whose mission is to provide software which supports the entire DevOps lifecycle – polled 5,296 software developers, CTOs and IT professionals, finding two in three say DevOps is a ‘tremendous time saver’ in the development process. 65% say the DevOps workflow saves them time – a figure which...

WordPress now powers 30% of all sites on the web, according to the latest figures from web survey provider W3Techs.

According to the most recent numbers, for the end of February 2018, WordPress is at 30.0% for absolute percentage of websites, giving it a 60.2% market share for all content management systems. It’s worth noting that just over half (50.2%) of sites analysed by W3Techs do not use a CMS monitored by the company, or are built from scratch. The figures arrive from analysis of the top 10...

Stack Overflow has announced the launch of a new salary calculator tool – which shows DevOps specialists and data scientists in the US are most likely to be making the most money.

Never mind whether developers use tabs or spaces for their code – a semi-serious report from Stack Overflow in June found those who use spaces are likelier to earn more than those who use tabs – the salary calculator focuses on location, education, and years of professional experience to come up with its...

Day one of BUILD, Microsoft’s developer conference, saw a variety of announcements and discussion around Azure, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as something of a shift in strategy.

First, the numbers. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, announced yesterday that Windows had reached 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices, up from 400 million devices in September, while also stressing the 12 million organisational entities in Azure Active Directory and the 100...

A new piece of research issued by the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) argues there is a ‘wide discrepancy’ between the revenue ambitions and reality for developers in virtual and augmented reality.

The survey, which polled more than 600 developers and users of VR and AR technology in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, found that half of developers whose firms would need more financing said they would need another round of more than €1 million. BOM argues that companies would need the...

In today’s business world, there are quite a few titles that don’t make much sense. Let’s face it, some of them are just flat out ridiculous. But, in a world where there are Happiness Heroes, Chief Inspiration Officers, and Retail Jedis, there is one newer job title that has made a huge difference for technology companies and that job belongs to the developer evangelist.

To those unfamiliar with this position, it may sound like it belongs in the list of absurd...

Nine years and over 2 million apps later, the App Store has become a spiralling behemoth. Whilst there are many great, innovative, immersive and useful apps - there is also a lot of dross. Unfortunately, even if you have a great app you may still end up with a failure on your hands.

One just needs to look at Storehouse, the visual storytelling app that won in Apple Design Awards 2014. Yesterday, the...

A new study from analyst house VisionMobile has looked into the global developer landscape – and found Java to be the most popular language while devs are increasingly working across multiple sectors, including mobile, IoT, and cloud.

The latter makes sense – as tools and languages work across sectors, the developers using them do as well – yet the research, which polls more than 30,000 developers each year, found some other interesting findings.

Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network simplified online multiplayer for both developers and gamers, but also created division in gamers as their online services locked them out from playing with friends who chose to invest their money in a different platform. Gamers have dreamt of a day when the wall between platforms came tumbling down, and...

Ahead of the upcoming final release, Google has released the next major version of its Android Studio IDE for developers to put through its paces and help to eliminate any lingering bugs ahead of its full debut. Available in the Beta release channel, Google says this version of Android Studio 2.0 "is near stable release quality and should be...

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